"Sh'ma" by Diane Fredgant. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

The TY Prayer Project

Reading Package #1: Exploring the Phenomenon of Prayer

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man

/ pg. 49 “FOR THY CONTINUAL MARVELS” The profound and perpetual awareness of the wonder of being has become a part of the religious consciousness of the Jews. Three times a day we pray:

We thank You . . .For Your miracles which are daily with us, For Your continual marvels. . . .In the evening liturgy we recite the words of Job (9:10): Who does great things past finding out, Marvelous things without number.

Every evening we recite: “He creates light and makes the dark.” Twice a day we say: “He is One.” What is the meaning of such repetition? A scientific theory, once it is announced and accepted, does not have to be repeated twice a day. The insights of wonder must be constantly kept alive. Since there is a need for daily wonder, there is a need for daily worship.

The sense for the “miracles which are daily with us,”* the sense for the “continual marvels,”* is the source of prayer. There is no worship, no music, no love, if we take for granted the blessings or defeats of living. No routine of the social, physical, or physiological order must dull our sense of surprise at the fact that there is a social, a physical, or a physiological order. We are trained in maintaining our sense of wonder by uttering a prayer before the enjoyment of food. Each time we are about to drink a glass of water, we remind ourselves of the eternal mystery of creation, “Blessed be You . . . by Whose word all things come into being.” A trivial act and a reference to the supreme miracle.

*These are phrases found in the second to last blessing of the amidah/standing prayer.

/pg. 301 The order of Jewish living is meant to be, not a set of rituals but an order of all man’s existence, shaping all his traits, interests, and dispositions; not so much the performance of single acts, the taking of a step now and then, as the pursuit of a way, being on the way; not much the acts of fulfilling as the state of being committed to the task the belonging to an order in which single deeds, aggregates of religious feeling, sporadic sentiments, morals episodes become a part of a complete pattern.

It is a distortion to reduce Judaism to a cult or system of ceremonies. The Torah is both the detail and the whole. As time and space are presupposed in any perception, so is the totality of life implied in every act of piety. There is an objective coherence that holds all episodes together. A man may commit a crime now and teach mathematics effortlessly an hour later. But when a man prays, all he has done in his life enters his prayer.

/pg. 350 …the essence of religion does not lie in the satisfaction of a human need. As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God whom he serves but his own self. Such satisfaction can be obtained from civilization, which supplies abundant means to gratify our needs. … We go out to meet the world not only by the way of expediency but also by the way of wonder. In the first we accumulate information in order to dominate; in the second we deepen our appreciation in order to respond. Power is the language of expediency; poetry the language of wonder.

He who goes to pray is not intent upon enhancing his store of knowledge; he who performs a ritual does not expect to advance his interests. Sacred deeds are designed to make living compatible with our sense of the ineffable. The mitzvot are forms of expressing in deeds the appreciation of the ineffable. They are terms of the spirit in which we allude to that which is beyond reason. To look for rational explanations, to scrutinize the mitzvot in terms of common sense is to quench their intrinsic meaning. What would be the value of proving that the observance of the dietary laws is helpful in the promotion of health, that keeping the Sabbath is conducive to happiness? It is not utility that we seek in religion but eternity. The criterion of religion is not in its being in agreement with our common sense but in its being compatible with our sense of the ineffable. The purpose of religion is not to satisfy the needs we feel but to create in us the need of serving ends, of which we otherwise remain oblivious.

/pg. 359 Religion is not given to us once and for as something to be preserved in a safe-deposit box. It must be re-created all the time. Mitzvot are forms; to fulfill a mitzvah means to fill it with meaning. The Psalmist prays: The Lord send forth Thy help from holiness,And support you out of Zion.Psalms 20:3

Help comes from holiness. But where is holiness? Is it embodied somewhere in space, in a celestial sphere? This is how the Rabbis interpreted the verse: “The Lord send forth your help from the holiness of the deeds which you have done, and support you out of Zion, from your distinction in deeds; from the sanctification of the name, from your sanctifications of deeds which is within you.”

Rabbi Amy Levin, Rosh Hashanah 5769/2010 Sermon on Prayer

Before I stopped watching Mel Gibson movies, I laughed and winced my way through the film “What Women Want.” The movie itself is really just another romantic comedy, but part of the premise that was so entertaining was an ability that Mel Gibson’s character acquired to be able to hear the “script” that ran through the heads of the women he met. It was quite an education for the guy Gibson portrayed. I wish that, for a moment, there would be some way for us to replay the scripts, the running streams of words and thoughts that were playing through each of our heads the last hour or so. What a cacophony that would be! “This seat is so uncomfortable, even standing up would be better!” “The cantor’s voice is so beautiful, I wish I could just close my eyes and listen to her.” “Look at how ‘x’ has aged since last year! He’s gained weight, too.” “Who shall live and who shall die? I don’t believe that’s how it works . . . but what if it is?” “I have an ark opening soon, I wonder if I have time to go to the bathroom and get back in time.” “I’m going to try to come to services more this year, I really am.” “I remember sitting next to my grandfather and listening to that melody.” “The sound of the shofar really gets to me.”

What we would hear is, that for all that we are in the same place at the same time, we are experiencing this morning differently.

The enterprise of communal worship, for all our unison singing, works differently for each of us. On one level, we are sharing the same experience, pondering the same words, singing the same melodies . . . but on the myriad levels below the surface, we are each bringing different levels of Jewish background and training, different kinds of faith, different memories of Rosh Hashanahs of the past, different personalities and different expectations. The wonder of it is that every once in a while for a few sweet moments, we do attain a kind of unity of consciousness and we are truly praying together.

In their comprehensive study of Prayer, entitled Prayer: A History, Philip and Carol Zaleski wrote: Prayer is at once spiritual and visceral: it stems from heart and gut as well as head. Prayer has been compared to a siege, a storm, a conflagration, a nosegay, a picnic in paradise. We may also liken it to an athletic event, such as the hurling of a javelin: a shaft of praise, petition, or penance aimed at a higher power. Like the javelin thrower, those who pray must be fit, the Zaleskis quote Chaucer: "Whoso will pray he must fast and be clean/And fat his soul, and make his body lean" (Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Somnour's Tale"). (Prayer Zaleski 6)

Personal prayer may be more satisfying when we follow Chaucer’s instruction to “fat our souls and make our bodies lean.” Our spiritual fitness, our capacity to hurl that javelin, that shaft of praise, petition or penance, is really up to us. To the degree we are moved to engage God in private conversation, that is the degree to which we will develop our spiritual fitness.

But Jewish communal prayer, the venture in which we are all engaged this morning, is a whole other matter. One could say that the bar is set pretty high for a satisfying Jewish communal prayer experience: there’s Hebrew, there’s a complex and lengthy structure to the prayer service, there’s Hebrew, there are mysterious moments sanctioned for standing and sitting, there are accoutrements like head-coverings and tallitot . . . and let’s not forget that there’s Hebrew.

I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about you all. You, who some of my colleagues call “The Jews in the Pews.” How are you managing through these services? Are you getting any spiritual satisfaction out of your time in our sanctuary? Are you bored? Frustrated? Intimidated? Am I doing everything possible to help you engage?

Seven of you responded to my questionnaire about Tefillah-TY, about the shape and feel of our services and what they mean to you. I want to thank those people for taking the time and for sharing so frankly. Seven people out of over three hundred is not a statistical sampling, but there are a few things expressed in those responses that are interesting: Everyone agreed that they have a sense of sharing something important with others worshipping here. All but a few acknowledged a sense of communicating with God and enjoying singing along with everyone else. Two people hoped we would do more creative things in our services and two hoped for more English . . . although one person specified that the English should not just be translations of the Hebrew, but meaningful additions to enhance our service. Perhaps the respondents were a self-selecting group, because no one claimed to feel bored or frustrated at services, although three did argue passionately for shorter services. More than half listed as a negative association praying in an all-but-empty sanctuary. Looking over these seven responses, the importance of praying with a community jumps out. The one feeling shared by all is the sense of sharing something important with others who are here . . . so being here for each other is a crucial element of satisfying worship. And the disappointment of coming to services and not finding others here is the mirror image of that satisfaction of sharing.

There’s a school of thought, about Jewish prayer, which says that praying, that really reaching that fulfilling, uplifting state of true Jewish prayer is like learning a musical instrument: a neophyte pianist must learn where to place fingers on the keyboard, and endlessly practice scales, and repeat simple exercises over and over . . . after having mastered quite a list of skills, then the neophyte pianist can begin to aspire to really make music.

I was afraid that praying in a minyan . . . however large or small . . . had to be like that: first master all the skills; the Hebrew, the structure, the melodies, the choreography . . . and then we can hope to “make the music” to truly communicate with God through Jewish vocabulary and liturgy. That is how we have been teaching prayer in Jewish supplementary and day schools for quite a few generations now. Indeed, everyone in this room who received any form of Jewish education as a child was schooled in prayer in just that way. We learned the aleph/beit, we learned the Sh’ma and V’ahavta, we learned how to lead a service for a class Shabbat or bar or bat mitzvah . . . we demonstrated the skills that our teachers imparted to us. But I’m not sure we prayed.

I was stuck. I was really having a hard time figuring out how to approach communal Jewish prayer in any other way. It is not hard to see that our communal Jewish prayer has been satisfying to only a handful of our members . . . a stalwart, committed, persevering handful. But I want our communal Jewish prayer to be satisfying, uplifting, nourishing to that persevering handful plus many, many more. I was stuck with that image of having to master the basic techniques before making the music.

And then my daughter Adina, who many of you know is studying for a PhD in Physics, sent me an article that kick-started a whole paradigm shift for me in terms of how we can grow as Jewish pray-ers. When I send this sermon to Adina, she’ll probably be pretty astounded, because the last thing she had on her mind, I’m sure, when she shared this article with me was helping me over a conceptual hump. But help she did.

The article is written by a man named Paul Lockhart and is entitled “A Mathematician’s Lament.” This is how it begins:

A painter has just awakened from a nightmare...

I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint.

“Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”

After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked. “Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”

“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”

“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”

Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

(A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart)

I’m afraid that in the world of Jewish education, the exercises and techniques that we substitute for prayer have as much in common with prayer as practicing dipping brushes in paint, wiping them off and painting by numbers has in common with painting . . . or, apparently, math!

I am afraid that hours of services have become, for some of us, anyway, senseless and soul-crushing instead of nourishing and spiritually uplifting. And that’s why you are not finding each other here to share those important things.

Rabbi Reuven Hammer, the author of the the commentary on our Sim Shalom prayerbook wrote: “In Revelation God reaches out to us, but in prayer we reach out to God.” (EJP 7) I suggest to you that in Revelation, God begins to build a bridge from the Divine side of the chasm, and in prayer, we begin to build a bridge from our human side. As God reveals and as we pray the two ends of the bridge come closer and closer. As God reveals, God seeks to be experienced by us and to experience us. As we pray, we seek to experience God and to be experienced by God.

Let’s imagine ourselves on that bridge for a moment. Close your eyes. Sit back in your seat, if you’re still holding a machzor, put it in the rack in front of you. Put your feet flat on the floor and imagine that you are standing on the edge of your side of the bridge, there’s a gap, and God is at the facing edge of the uncompleted bridge.

Introduce yourself to God: Fill in the blanks in the following sentences with your own words coming from your own heart:

Hello God. I am . . .

God, I want You to know what, who, is most dear to me:

God, I want You to know that what frightens me is:

God, I want You to know me, so I want to tell you about a hope that I treasure in my heart:

That cocoon of God’s embrace is spreading to include those who are sitting next to you, in front of you, behind you. We are all standing at the edge of that bridge . . . only now, our side and God’s side are much closer to each other than they were before.

You might want to hold the hand of someone next to you as you open your eyes . . .

Two thousand years ago, “Hillel the Elder said: ‘Do you not know that although there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of angels, yet God desires not their praise, but the praise of Israel. As it is written: “But You are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praise of Israel.” (Psalm 22:4) Avot d’Rabi Natan B 27:

What is our liturgy but the record of the words that Jews before us have crafted to praise God, to share gratitude for our very existence, and to be known to God . . . hopes, fears, points of pride and acknowledgments of shortcomings . . . to express appreciation for the warm, accepting, loving embrace that blesses us no matter what.

Prayer is not Torah. Prayer is our words, not God’s words. We decide what we want to say to God. In order to “enthrone God upon the praise of Israel”, we, Israel, must come together to decide what words we will use to pray. When an individual stands on the edge of an individually-built bridge, the connection to God is personal, idiosyncratic, specific to that relationship between God and an individual. When we stand on the edge of the bridge we have been constructing together, we need to speak together, otherwise God will only hear a cacophony, it would be a bridge, rather than a tower, of Babel. But to be Israel, forging a relationship with the God of Israel, we need to raise our voices together. . . that is liturgy.

Some planks of our bridge have been lifted from the Torah; some of the planks were contributed by Jews in the 12th century in Spain and from Jews in the Land of Israel in the 16th century. Yet other planks, planks of chant and music, have been reverently crafted and fixed into place by inspired Jews in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. And the joists are ready to receive our contributions to the bridge as well.

Not only will placing our contributions to Jewish prayer allow us to take a few steps closer to God together, but generations of Jews behind us will stand on our planks, as we have stood on the planks of our predecessors . . . our words will bring them closer to God just as the words of those 12th, 16th and 19th century Jews have brought us closer to God.

One of the words in Hebrew that we use for prayer is “tefillah.” By adding a suffix and creating the word Tefillati, we say “my prayer.” Most transliterations would probably spell “Tefillati with a “ti” at the end . . . but here at TY, at Torat Yisrael, we will be spelling “my prayer” with a “ty” at the end . .. Tefillah-Ty . . my prayer is the prayer of Torat Yisrael.

A couple of Sunday mornings a month, I will offer a Tefiilah-TY Workshop. In the sacred space we will create together over coffee and bagels and other good Sunday morning munchies, we will work on new planks for our bridge. In order to make sure that our engineering is sound, we will take a good look at the plans that have been in place for centuries, in order to understand why they have stood the test of time. We’ll study the structure of our bridge to make sure that our additions will not contribute to its collapse . . . and, as innumerable Jews before us have done, we will creatively, reverently craft our own planks and offer them to our Torat Yisrael family as a support for true prayer within the shelter of the walls of our synagogue.

Do not hesitate to join us. There is no high bar here. There is no level of observance, piety or education that is required to be part of our Tefillah-TY enterprise. Remember Hillel the Elder’s words: “God desires the praise of Israel.” The term “Israel” encompasses us all. The name Torat Yisrael encompasses us all. There is no one who deserves to sit at the Tefillah-TY table more than anyone else. Help us to create engaging, soul-nourishing worship.

Rabbi Daniel Gordis, God Was Not in the Fire: The Search for a Spiritual Judaism

/pg. 184

Jewish prayer is not catechism. Judaism is too respectful of our individuality, our minds, and our personal struggle to demand that prayer become a recitation of a series of “I believe” statements. Nor is Jewish prayer about asking for a variety of tangible goods or outcomes. And finally, the Jewish liturgical experience is not even designed to make us feel good or comfortable every moment.

Jewish prayer, like Jewish life, is about spiritual growth. It is about wonder, about awe. It recognizes our fear, and our fear of fearing. It demands work, but not absolute or unthinking submission. It respects and validates our struggle, and claims that as we confront ourselves—what we are proud of and what we most desperately wish to change—we do the most important work in human life.

It was Yeats who said that when we argue with others, we create rhetoric, but when we argue with ourselves, we create poetry. That poetry of self-examination is the stuff of which our liturgy is made. The siddur* seeks not to constrain, but to enable. Prayer, though every difficult, is but a reflection of the search that is Jewish life. It demands our attention and our seriousness, but it does not demand that we give up being who we are. Ultimately, prayer—like all Jewish life—validates much of who we are, and insists that with effort and with some fortune we can become even more thoughtful and more caring human beings, inching ever closer to the expression of God’s image that is at the very foundation of each and every one of us.

*prayerbook. From the Hebrew “seder” which means “order.” The Siddur is the Jewish order of prayer.

Rabbi Mike Comins, Making Prayer Real: Leading Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer is Difficult and What to Do About It

Rabbi Mike Comins interviewed a number of Jewish spiritual leaders for his book, Making Prayer Real. Here are a few excerpts on prayer from Rabbi Comins' book.

Rabbi Jonathan P. Slater

One way to get to the bottom of what prayer is, is to ask, what does prayer do?

All prayer—when we pay attention, whether personal or liturgical—is ultimately a form of speaking the truth. It makes us aware of what is going on in our lives in this moment—so that we can see clearly and respond appropriately.

The one who prayers is like the shofar. The shofar itself has no independent significance or power. It is only meaningful when someone blows into it. The sound that emerges is recognized and has a meaning. We are the shofar—and it is God who moves through us, “blows” on us to generate the prayer that emerges. Thus, prayer is the closing of a circle, the making of a connection between self and Self, creating a united whole.

Rabbi Sheryl Lewart

Prayer changes and affects the person who prays because prayer opens the heart. Prayer lets down the barriers between our intimate longings, our private pain, our anxious clutching fears, and everything else. the very interiority of a prayer experience (even a prayer as brief as “Wow”) opens and exposes our tender hearts.

Rabbi David J. Wolpe

I like the Leona Medina image. If you saw somebody pulling a boat to the shore and were mistaken about mechanics and motion, you might think that he was pulling the shore to the boat. And that’s what prayer is like. You think that you’re pulling God to you, but in fact, if you pray well, you pull yourself to God.

Prayer isn’t only comforting, it’s also disturbing. It can stir up parts of you that are more comfortable left dormant. That’s not always easy. I think that one of the reasons to shy away from prayer is that you don’t want to hear that part of yourself and prayer brings it out.

Rabbi Laura Geller

What prayer means to me is turning myself so that I’m no longer the center of the story. I’m reminded of that kids’ book Zoom, where you start out looking at a farmhouse, and then you go back and see that it’s really a picture on a wall in a room, and then you go back further and see the room is in a house, and further and further until eventually, you’re seeing this from “God’s perspective.” And suddenly, the universe is completely different and the place of that farmhouse is a completely different story. At my best, prayer is about getting out of my own way and, as much as possible, trying to see the world for a moment through the metaphoric eyes of God.

Rabbi Jamie Korngold

I don’t pray to God with my prayers. I experience God through my prayers, with my community. when my voice is joining with twenty other people’s voices, chanting the Amidah, I experience God through that moment. I’m not praying to God for something to happen.

Rabbi Michael Strassfeld

[Prayer] is a time for reflection, a precious gift to ourselves amidst our busy lives. The liturgy should remind us:

1. There is something larger than ourselves in the universe—what many of us call God. It is an important perspective that also reminds us that we are not alone.

2. It should be a time to reflect on the spiritual issues in our lives. To think about how to improve my ethical qualities to be more like the person I deeply desire to be.

3. It is an opportunity to express gratitude for the blessings in our lives—most of all the blessing of life itself.

This is in fact a reconstruction of the traditional forms of rabbinic prayer: shevah (praise), bakasha (request), hoda’ah (thanks). Reframing bakasha as focusing on spiritual growth rather than asking God for things is a critical redefining of prayer.

Any comments, reactions, questions or suggestions for Rabbi Levin and the TY Prayer Project team?